Tag: music Page 13 of 15

Good Questions, part 1

On March 9, 2011

Now, it’s true that I’ve had some trivia experience. However, I wouldn’t exactly claim to be an expert on question-writing. Compared to many of the people I know from that world, I’m a raw newbie. Not only that, there are people out there in the world who actually make their living (or at least a side income) from writing questions, like for example Paul Paquet, who penned just about the best article I’ve seen on writing good quiz questions.

Nevertheless, I’ve been writing trivia questions for a number of years now, and along the way I’ve contracted some opinions on what makes a question good or not-so-good. And what is a blog for if not to toss your unsolicited, inexpert opinions out to a disinterested world? So without further preamble, here are some of the principles I’ve found important in question-writing.

KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE

This is one of those pieces of advice that really applies to any kind of writing. It’s even more crucial in writing for a game, though, because when you’re writing something static like a novel or (say) a blog post, your reader can walk away with impunity. Interaction increases audience investment in the experience, giving you a bit more of a captive audience, especially when the interaction is of a social nature, like trivia. Be a good captor. Write questions suited for your, um, prisoners. Okay, I’m walking away from this metaphor before it turns into an extended meditation on Stockholm syndrome.

I’ve primarily written trivia questions for two sets of people. One set is the Basement Bowl regulars, trivia enthusiasts (and often champions) whose collective knowledge is astonishing. The other set is my co-workers — for several years I published a weekly trivia quiz at my job to promote social mixing, have fun at work, and raise morale. (It worked great until I got too isolated, overworked, and demoralized.) The trivia came in different formats, but the differences were deeper than that. I pitched the questions differently, because the two groups have different ideas of fun. For instance, I might write a question like this for the Basement Bowl:

Some directors’ first films were huge, memorable hits. Others… not so much. I’ll give you a director’s first film along with its year of release, you name the director, for ten points each. The films I’m choosing are feature-length, theatrically released in the U.S., and solely directed by that person.
1. Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? (1966)
2. Hard Eight (1996)
3. Eight (1998)
4. Cars That Eat People (1974)

When I posed that same question for my co-workers, I gave the director’s first three films:

1. Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? (1966), The Graduate (1967), Catch-22 (1970)
2. Hard Eight (1996), Boogie Nights (1997), Magnolia (1999)
3. Eight (1998), Billy Elliot (2000), The Hours (2002)
4. Cars That Eat People (1974), Picnic At Hanging Rock (1975), Black Rain (1977)

[Answers at the bottom of this post]

On my co-workers’ quiz, I also provided 26 more questions, including people with a very recognizable first few films: Spike Lee, Quentin Tarantino, Michael Moore, David Lynch, Woody Allen, etc. Why? Because your basic group of office workers, who are doing trivia as a fun break, are not likely to be the sort of film fiends who would recognize a lot of obscure early work from now-famous directors. If they don’t have a clue on any of the questions, they’re likely to roll their eyes and never take one of these stupid quizzes again. Nobody likes to be completely stumped over and over again. Which leads me to my next point…

KICKING ASS IS MORE FUN

Trivia is supposed to be fun, and there’s nothing fun about feeling like an idiot. A good trivia game should leave you feeling smart, not stupid. That means that you should pitch your questions to a range with “fairly easy” on one end and “fairly difficult” on the other. Actually, “pitch” is the wrong metaphor — a pitcher is trying to prevent the batter from getting a hit, but a quizmaster should not be trying to prevent players from getting right answers. It’s not very hard to stump trivia players, even the greatest trivia players. In fact, I’d say that anybody can write a question that will stump a given person. All you have to do is ask for obscure enough information. Nobody knows it all, nor should they need to. The experience you should be trying to provide is one of success mixed with challenge.

I aim for about a 70/30 ratio between these two, but of course I rarely hit that. Gauging difficulty is one of the hardest things to do in writing questions, especially in areas where you either know a whole lot or very little. In the former case, all the information feels so familiar that it’s hard to get a sense of what a regular person might know. For instance, I’d have difficulty writing a full Simpsons quiz without a little feedback from somebody who hasn’t watched the show for ages. Is asking for the Simpsons’ address a hard question or an easy question? Seems easy to me, but I don’t trust my perceptions about it.

By the same token, when you know very little about a subject, all the questions seem hard. One of my running jokes in the Basement Bowl is that I always apologize for my sports questions in advance, because I very frequently have only a dim sense of how easy or hard they might be. I look at each one and think, “I sure would never have known that without looking it up!” Knowing I’m going to err, I try to err on the side of success.

So if kicking ass is more fun, why not make all the questions super easy? Well, because if you’re answering questions that practically any literate person could get without effort, you don’t feel like you’re kicking ass. Consider this question: “This network is home to Good Morning America, Cougar Town, Grey’s Anatomy, Nightline, and The Academy Awards. It also shares its name with the first three letters of the alphabet. What is it?” The first sentence is a fair question for general audiences, but the second sentence makes it into a terrible question for almost all audiences. What’s fun about being quizzed on things that a four-year-old would know? (Unless you are a four-year-old, of course — see “Know Your Audience.”) The one situation in which I could see this question working is a buzzer-beater game, in which the questions start out giving an advantage based on knowledge, but if nobody can capitalize on that advantage, it turns into a “fastest thumb” challenge.

On the “fairly difficult” side of the spectrum, as I said, the goal shouldn’t be to stump people. There are some questions in every game that a player just isn’t going to know, and that’s fine. What’s important is to avoid asking questions that nobody would know. Ideally, you want players to look back on the questions they missed and think, “I should have known that!”, not “Who on earth would know that?” The other good reason to have fairly difficult questions in the mix is that sometimes they give players the opportunity to reach out and clock an unexpected home run, which is the most kick-ass feeling of all. (Wow, the baseball metaphors sure are offering themselves to me tonight.)

BORING INFORMATION SUCKS

Here’s a sample question from my “Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame Trivia Challenge” calendar:

In 1965, Leo Fender sold his Fender Guitar Company to CBS for what price?
a. $13 million
b. $19 million
c. $22 million

Remember when I said that you don’t want players to look at a question and think, “Who on earth would know that?” Well, an even worse reaction to generate is, “Who on earth would care about that?” Which is exactly what I think when I see this question. The sale amount for a guitar company is a very banal piece of information. About the only person who’d have an emotional attachment to the difference between these numbers is Leo Fender himself. Trivia calendar, Leo Fender is not your audience. In general, this calendar feels like the product of somebody combing through a book of “This Day In Rock History” facts. Which means that you get some pretty good and interesting questions (“Which album by Johnny Cash was the first country album to top the U.S. pop chart?”) but a lot of questions like the one above. If I were this person’s editor, I would emphasize the fact that we’re supposed to care about the answer.

What could make this question better? Well, if it were actually an interesting amount of money, that’d make it reasonable. For instance, if the multiple choice answers were “a) $1,300 b) $13 million c) $130 million”, that’d be a step in the right direction. Each of those answers tells a pretty different story about what that sale might have meant to Fender, and whether the company was valued properly, which is likely to be more compelling information. Of course, it’d be even better if the answer were one of the outliers, but it isn’t.

Another way to improve it might be to switch around what the question is actually asking about: “In 1965, who sold his guitar company to CBS for $13 million?” That doesn’t quite get us there, though, because (in my opinion) it falls outside the realm of something the average music fan could reasonably be expected to know. So we’d want to inject a hint or two in there: “In 1965, what designer of the Telecaster and the Stratocaster sold his guitar company to CBS for $13 million?” Now we’re asking for an association that is fair game for music fans, and we’ve got ourselves a reasonable trivia question.

I’ve got more, but it’ll have to wait, because this post has gone on long enough. Meanwhile, how about some answers?

First films:
1. Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? (1966) — Mike Nichols
2. Hard Eight (1996) — Paul Thomas Anderson
3. Eight (1998) — Stephen Daldry
4. Cars That Eat People (1974) — Peter Weir

The Simpsons live at 742 Evergreen Terrace in Springfield, which is famously vague about what state it’s in.

According to the calendar, Ring Of Fire was the first country album to top the pop chart. Wikipedia doesn’t seem to want to corroborate that today — it says the album only reached #26, though it was “the first #1 album when Billboard debuted their Country Album Chart on Jan. 11, 1964.” Not that Wikipedia is an authoritative source or anything, but neither is the RRHOF calendar.

Trivial Matters 2: Electric Boogaloo

By paulobrian

On January 25, 2011

In Uncategorized

In my last entry, I explained the structure of the trivia bowl, and talked about its history at CU. Before I continue, let me provide some answers to the questions I posed there:

Q: James Rado, Gerome Ragni, and Galt MacDermot were the writers behind what song medley, which won Record Of The Year, topped the charts for six weeks in 1969, and was the biggest hit in the 5th Dimension’s career?
Answer: “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In”

I’ll name a fictional computer from a movie, you name the movie, for ten points each.
1. MU-TH-R 182 model 2, the ship-board computer on the space ship Nostromo, known by the crew as ‘mother.’
Answer: Alien
2. Deep Thought, a computer created by a pan-dimensional, hyper-intelligent race of beings who look to us exactly like white mice.
Answer: The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy
3. EMERAC, a room-sized computer recently acquired by the Federal Broadcasting Network, whose worth is advocated by inventor Richard Sumner and doubted by reference librarian Bunny Watson.
Answer: Desk Set
4. WOPR, or War Operations Plan Response, a military simulator housed at NORAD.
Answer: Wargames

Now for my trivia autobiography (a redundant phrase, perhaps.) I grew up loving music, movies, and to a lesser extent, TV, as well as comics, theater, and the other sorts of topics that show up in the trivia bowl… except for sports. I was always a casual Bronco fan, but never somebody who could quote statistics or even name all the players. I enjoy seeing the games, but I never mind missing them either. I had a fling with baseball fandom for a couple of years, but then they went on strike and I got thoroughly disgusted with the whole thing.

As for basketball, hockey, NASCAR, golf, etc… don’t care. Never cared. I don’t mind watching tennis, and a bit of Olympics, but I only know the most surface facts about any of this stuff, if that. I do know a little about the WNBA and women’s soccer, thanks to Laura, but now that we have the Dante Distraction, soccer has left the limelight, and many of the WNBA games have moved over to some silly premium cable channel, so even that knowledge is pretty patchy.

Anyway, when I came to CU, I was only dimly aware of the trivia bowl, pretty much as “that thing that sounds kind of interesting but that I’m way too busy to do.” Finally, in 1993 my friend Robby told me that he knew a couple of teachers from our high school who wanted to field a team for the bowl, and asked me if I’d be interested. Robby was/is a total sports guy, as well as music and movies. Our mutual friend James covered TV, as well as some knowledge in all the other areas, and one of the teachers, Ron Hoover, was an absolute monster on old movies. So I said sure, and when we played our first game, wow. I still remember a visceral thrill from buzzing in on toss-ups before the question was finished, because I had such a strong feeling about the answer:

HOST: “Enya has had multiplatinum success with albums like Watermark, but before she–”
ME: BUZZ! “Clannad.”
HOST: “Clannad is correct.”

Whoo! Man, it was exciting. The other thing I remember is the fun of guessing on answers after the question had been read, if nobody else was buzzing in. Sometimes it even worked out:

HOST: “Who has the record for most guest appearances on The Love Boat?”
ME: [After a long pause in which it becomes clear that nobody is going to attempt this.] BUZZ. “Uh… Charo?”
HOST: “Yes, it is Charo!”

Our team actually won a game or two, but got blown out in the later rounds by more experienced and knowledgeable teams. There was a ceremony after the final game, and I was named Rookie Of The Year! Sadly, I had to work, so wasn’t able to accept in person. Even more sadly, 1993 was the final year of the trivia bowl. It is really a bummer to be Rookie Of The Year in the final year of something.

The whole event was dormant for a number of years, but when the CU Program Council brought it back in 2001, I knew I wanted to play. I got together a team of me, Robby, our mutual friend May from high school, and my friend Trish from work. Again, we did well in the early rounds and got stomped later, but that year I had an epiphany: these are my people. I attended every game I could (which was a lot — the tournament went all week, starting with 64 teams and narrowing down to two) and soaked the whole thing in. That was the year I officially fell in love with the trivia bowl.

Unfortunately, I was in the minority. The revival lasted one more year, in which our loss came to the team who went on to win the whole thing… a team led by Ed Toutant, the second biggest winner in the history of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. But attendance was anemic, and while the whole thing was super DUPER fun for me, it was a losing proposition for the Program Council, who pulled the plug in 2002.

After that, the event was held for a number of years in a much, much more scaled down form every fall. It was little conference rooms rather than the Glenn Miller Ballroom, with maybe 6-10 teams competing, no audio/video questions, and a more regimented quiz-bowly format which values strategy over entertainment. Not that there’s anything wrong with that — I made sure to play every year, and it was one of my favorite things, but it was a far cry from the heyday of it all. Now even that is gone, or at least it hasn’t been held for the last couple of years.

That smaller scale, though, enabled me to forge some relationships with trivia bowl “royalty” — the various Hall Of Famers who now moderate games and form a coterie whose history stretches back 30 or 40 years. One of these people, David Gatch, sort of took me under his wing a few years ago and got me invited to a very kooky event called the “Basement Bowl.”

…and that’s where part 3 will begin. But just to keep the trivia power flowing, here’s another toss-up and bonus.

Following in the footsteps of Anthony Michael Hall and Jason Lively, he played Rusty Griswold in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. More famously, he appeared as David Healey, Darlene’s boyfriend and eventual husband, in 92 episodes of Roseanne. Name this actor who currently stars as Dr. Leonard Hofstader on The Big Bang Theory.

In the 1960s, Marvel Comics loved to liven up its titles by throwing in an extra adjective. I’ll give you a comic book title, you fill in the missing adjective, for five points each.
1. The _____ Hulk
2. The _____ Spider-Man
3. The _____ Iron Man
4. The _____ X-Men
5. The _____ Thor
6. The _____ Ant-Man

Trivial Matters

By paulobrian

On January 23, 2011

In Uncategorized

Having just been to another Basement Bowl, I’ve been ruminating on a blog entry about what makes a good trivia question. And I do want to write that, but first I’d like to address those of you who may be saying, “another Basment Wha?”

Let me say: this is going to be long. Consequently, I’m breaking it up into a series of posts. This first one is the big lump of backstory that’s required to understand my personal trivia history. Your eyes may glaze over. This is normal.

I can go back quite a ways with my connection to trivia — I remember having books like Fred L. Worth’s Trivia Encyclopedia sitting around the house as a kid, and playing Trivial Pursuit with my family. (My dad dominated, though really he was only competing with one other adult.)

Meanwhile, the University of Colorado, my alma mater two times over and now my employer, started hosting an official Trivia Bowl in 1968, sponsored by a professor who’d just led a CU team to victory in the GE College Bowl. The difference was that while the College Bowl focused on various academic areas, the Trivia Bowl was dedicated solely to pop-cultural ephemera: music, movies, TV, sports, and “garbage”, which encompasses things like comic strips, theater, radio, etc.

The games follow a standard “quiz bowl” format. Two teams of four array against each other. Each team member has a buzzer. The moderator reads a “toss-up” question worth 10 points. At any point during the reading of the question, an individual may buzz in with the answer. If she interrupts with a wrong answer, her team incurs a 5-point penalty and the other team can listen to the entire question. A wrong answer that doesn’t interrupt incurs no penalty. No conferencing or teamwork is allowed on toss-up questions — if the judges see a conference, that team is automatically disqualified for that question, and the other team has a chance to buzz in.

A correct answer on a toss-up earns the right to a “bonus question”, worth anywhere from 20 to 40 points, and on these, teamwork IS allowed. (It’s usually essential, in fact.) These are usually multi-part questions, often with some kind of theme tying them together.

Example of a toss-up question:

James Rado, Gerome Ragni, and Galt MacDermot were the writers behind what song medley, which won Record Of The Year, topped the charts for six weeks in 1969, and was the biggest hit in the 5th Dimension’s career?

Example of a bonus question:

I’ll name a fictional computer from a movie, you name the movie, for ten points each.
1. MU-TH-R 182 model 2, the ship-board computer on the space ship Nostromo, known by the crew as ‘mother.’
2. Deep Thought, a computer created by a pan-dimensional, hyper-intelligent race of beings who look to us exactly like white mice.
3. EMERAC, a room-sized computer recently acquired by the Federal Broadcasting Network, whose worth is advocated by inventor Richard Sumner and doubted by reference librarian Bunny Watson.
4. WOPR, or War Operations Plan Response, a military simulator housed at NORAD.

Teams compete against each other in a long tournament — at the height of the trivia bowl, it started with 64 teams and narrowed down to two. The game consists of two ten-minute halves, though later in the tournament these periods are sometimes longer. There’s multimedia fun too — audio and video for both the tossups and bonuses.

The Trivia Bowl got quite popular, playing to packed houses in the Glenn Miller Ballroom throughout the 70s. A version of it was broadcast on ABC’s Wide World Of Sports at one point. Teams tried to outdo each other with silly, funny names (e.g. “Children Of A Lesser Godzilla”, “Bill Clinton Sings ‘Devil With A Blue Dress On'”), and the level of competition was impressive — there are people out there with some frighteningly encyclopedic knowledge about pop culture. The matches lasted through the week, and on the Friday before the finals there’d be a concert by some oldies act — Del Shannon, The Guess Who, Bo Diddley, etc.

The Bowl’s popularity endured a slow decline through the eighties, and by the early 90s attendance was sparse indeed. CU finally pulled the plug on the event in 1993, with a brief revival from 2001-2002. The year after that, a guy named Paul Bailey continued the Bowl in diminished form — people gathering in small conference rooms to answer questions, no audio or video, and no audience. But still fun.

Okay, that’s all for now. Next post will explain my personal history with all this, and give answers to the questions in this post. If you don’t want to wait that long, I will be happy to confirm or deny any answers that appear in the comments.

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the net

By paulobrian

On September 24, 2010

In Uncategorized

On the very occasional occasions when I write some stuff on other sites, I try to mention it here. So…

I’ve just written a couple of Amazon reviews: one for the new Melissa Etheridge album, and one for an out-of-print book of quotations. Writing a review of an out-of-print book may be the very definition of pointless.

Also, while I’m much more of a Facebooker than a Tweeter, there was a meme on Twitter recently I just couldn’t resist. The game was called “#rockretractions” — basically, the voice of a song revising what it originally said. I tried my hand.

My favorite one that I wish I’d written was, “On the other hand, I may be right and you may be crazy.” Also, while I’m quoting things that made me laugh, another recent meme on Twitter was, for some reason, “#namesfortinywhales.” Perhaps it was just localized to a few people I follow. Anyway, my friend Iain wrote “wee frilly”, and it’s been periodically cracking me up ever since.

The Beatles — Love

By paulobrian

On July 9, 2010

In Uncategorized

I have to confess, the whole Love thing completely passed me by. I vaguely heard, four years ago or so, that Cirque du Soleil was doing some Beatles tribute show. Because I’ve never seen a Cirque show, and because my imagination has been stunted by television and video games, all I can picture is a bunch of guys in tights, swinging from trapezes, forming human pyramids, and so forth. To Beatles music. I yawn, and move on.

Then my friend Trrish made a special trip to Las Vegas to see the show, and told me a bit more about the way the music worked, and I was intrigued enough to pick up the album. And now that I’ve listened to it ten times in a row and had my mind completely BLOWN, I have to write about it, and I have to evangelize it to everybody I know who loves the Beatles. So I will gladly acknowledge the gooniness of gushing over an album 4 years after it comes out, just because it happened to take me that long to get around to it. It’s like writing a bunch of breathless blog posts about Buffy The Vampire Slayer in 2006, 3 years after it was cancelled. Which, y’know, I also did. So I guess this sort of thing is really my stock in trade nowadays.

If you’re way out of the loop like me, let me tell you a little about this album. It’s the soundtrack to the Cirque show, yes. But more importantly, it’s an exquisite, loving collage of Beatles sounds, made by people who have the music in their DNA: George Martin and his son Giles. They take the songs and pull apart their elements, mixing them together ingeniously, so that a solo from one song might float through the intro of another, fading smoothly into a third. Every sound on the record (with one exception, which I’ll discuss later) is from a Beatles recording. Sometimes the songs stand on their own for a while, sometimes the mixtures are subtle, and sometimes they jump out and grab you by the throat.

The sound is uniformly fantastic. I’ve never heard the songs sound better, even (or, perhaps, especially) when they’re not mixed up. Listening to this CD is an enormously thrilling experience if you have the music deeply engraved in your brain like I do. Seriously, if you love the Beatles, and you haven’t heard this album, stop reading right now, buy it, listen to it, and then come back. I’ll be here. You probably want to experience it fresh. I recommend headphones.

And just so you know, if you’re sensitive to this kind of thing in an album review:

Easy Ready Willing Overtime

By paulobrian

On January 23, 2010

In Uncategorized

Over the last several years, I’ve evolved a Christmas tradition with my friends Siân and Kelly, in which my gift to them is a mix CD of songs that I’ve been listening to over the last year. (The year goes November-October, so that I can send it in time to Britain, where they live.) Siân often reciprocates with a mix of her own. More recently, we’ve started writing “liner notes” to accompany these mixes. I just finished writing up the liner notes to the compilation I sent her for Xmas 2009, titled Easy Ready Willing Overtime. Since it turned out rather detailed, and I haven’t posted anything here for a while, I thought I’d add some links and throw it out here.

I was hoping to be able to provide a nifty flash widget or something with each song, but apparently LiveJournal does not allow those sorts of Javascript shenanigans. So instead I’m linking to the mp3 version of each song on Amazon, which generally has a 30-second sample of each tune. I am a big fan of buying digital music on Amazon, as they deliver regular mp3s rather than other DRM-infested funky formats. Where no mp3 is available, I linked to a YouTube version, for the sake of at least making the song available to hear. In addition, I threw in links to the CDs and some other miscellaneous links.

Etta James at the Boulder Theater, 6/13

By paulobrian

On June 21, 2009

In Uncategorized

I became an Etta James fan in kind of a backwards way. Being quite the dedicated Eurythmics fan back in the 80’s, I even paid attention to their quirky little side projects. One of these was the soundtrack for a 1989 movie called Rooftops, which I never saw but was apparently fairly awful. Dave Stewart did some songs for it, and one of these was a track called “Avenue D”, on which Etta was the vocalist. I didn’t really know who she was, aside from the fact that I recognized her name and knew she’d been around a while. I did read a little article saying something like, “Dave Stewart does his best work when paired with a soulful singer, and James certainly fills the bill.” I was at NYU at the time — I actually remember listening to the 45 at Tower Records, liking the song, and buying it. I really dug her performance on that song. I looked into her a little more (which in those pre-Internet days meant just paying attention to what records of hers were in the stores), and found that she had done a comeback album the previous year called Seven Year Itch. A friend and I split the cost of the cassette, and I really liked that too. I bought her next couple of records, then lost track of her for a while.

10 years or so later, I became conscious of “At Last”, again in a backwards way — Stevie did a cover of it at a benefit concert where everybody sang standards. I fell in love with the song then, and heard Etta’s version later in the movie Pleasantville, and loved it again. Still, I never got around to pursuing her further, until this past Christmas, when I put The Essential Etta James on my Amazon wish list, and received it. I’d been listening to it a lot in the car when I heard that she was coming to Boulder in concert. I decided that I needed to go, and I found a fantastic ticket online: 2nd row aisle seat.

When I got there, I was thrilled to find that it was indeed one of the best seats in the house. I had a perfect sightline to everything, and was wonderfully close. There was an unannounced opening act, which was a drag — I’d asked Laura to cover childcare so I could get to the show on time. If I’d known, I’d certainly have come much later. Anyhow, after that, stagehands started setting up Etta’s stage, including a big comfy leather seat with the word “Etta!” inscribed on the front. At 9:00, her band filed onstage, along with somebody who didn’t introduce himself. He greeted the crowd, said “Miss James is in the house!”, and then introduced The Roots Band. (Not The Roots, who appear on Jimmy Fallon’s talk show, but rather just a bunch of touring musicians.) It was cool — a horn section, two guitarists, keyboard, bass, and drums. So then The Roots Band proceeds to vamp for 10 minutes.

Finally, Etta herself comes out, sits on the chair, and opens with “Come To Mama,” a song from Seven Year Itch that I’d known previously when Bob Seger recorded it (as “Come To Papa.”) In Seger’s hands, the song has a clear sexual subtext. Coming from James, the subtext becomes supertext, with lyrics like “If you feel like a horse chomping at the bit / Call my number, 777-6969, I’ll get you a fix.” But lyrics aside, OH MY GOD. It was easily the most sexual performance I’d ever seen, and I’ve seen both Tori Amos and Liz Phair (the latter of whom suffered a wardrobe malfunction that exposed her bare breast to the audience for the better part of a song.) Etta sang the entire song while absolutely pawing herself, and I mean her entire body, giving special emphasis to lines like “I’ve got your favorite toy / Guaranteed to bring you joy.” We are talking about a 71-year-old woman here, a grandmother, whose son is actually in the band, as her drummer. It was, to say the least, a little shocking. I wasn’t really bothered by it (though as a friend of mine pointed out, would you want to watch your mother doing that night after night?), but I was pretty floored. She continued in that vein the entire show. She never stood up, but her hands never rested much either. When singing “I’d Rather Go Blind,” she elaborated: “Sittin here thinkin’ of your kiss, and your… mmmmm, you all know what I’m talkin’ about.” And the song after that was called, “I Want To Ta-Ta You, Baby.”

While Etta’s libido has never waned (at least if her stage shtick is to be believed), I’m afraid the same can’t be said for her mind. For one thing, she clearly thought she was in Canada. “It’s been a long time since I’ve played in Canada!” she said. “I’m so happy to be back!” I thought she was joking at first, but then in the next song, she introduced her guitarist with, “This is Joshua. He’s Canadian, too!” She also introduced “I’d Rather Go Blind” by saying, “Here’s a song my sons and I wrote together.” Now, that song was first recorded in 1969, when James was 31 years old. The Internet doesn’t seem to want to tell me when her sons were born, but it does tell me that the song is co-credited to Ellington Jordan, not Donto and Sametto James. Oh, and then there was the long introduction where she said she was going to do a song by one of the baddest chicks of all time, Janis Joplin, and that song is called, “You Can Leave Your Hat On.” Written by Randy Newman. In 1972. Two years after Joplin died. All I could do was shake my head and laugh.

Her voice, though, still sounds amazing. She kept stealing glances at the lyric sheet next to her, but that didn’t stop her from nailing every single note. She also had a terrific stage presence, despite remaining seated the entire time. She was always playfully, bawdily bantering with the audience, even as she was performing songs. In “You Can Leave Your Hat On,” after she sang the line, “Suspicious minds are talking / They’re trying to tear us apart,” she would very clearly mouth the words “FUCK THEM.” It was hilarious.

Unfortunately, while the music was great, I didn’t get to hear it for very long — at 9:55, she said good night, and walked off stage, only to immediately drive back on astride a little red Rascal scooter. She sat back down in the chair and sang “At Last”, sounding phenomenal. And then… that was it. She left, stage lights came up, just an hour after the band had come on. That was very disappointing to me, as the ticket hadn’t been cheap. I quite understand that it’s probably hard on her to play very long, but if the length of your show is going to be much less than is conventionally accepted, your ticket price should be well below the standard too.

All in all, it was one of the strangest shows I’d ever seen. I loved the music, and was greatly amused by the rest. But I sure wish I’d known to come late, and been ready to leave early.

Replacing LAUNCHcast

By paulobrian

On February 11, 2009

In Uncategorized

I’ve mentioned here a few times before that I love my LAUNCHcast station. I created a custom station there (after being driven from the previously shuttered radio.sonicnet, and Imagine Radio before that) in 2003, and over the course of the next five years rated a total of 25,094 artists, albums, and songs.

Imagine my chagrin when I was informed via email at the end of last year that CBS Radio is taking over LAUNCHcast, and that customized stations will be eliminated. After a quick trip through the stages of grief, I started in on the project of finding a new fix for my internet radio jones.

I had a few requirements:

I want to be able to construct a station based on a fixed list of artists, with the occasional movie or show soundtrack thrown in, e.g. Rocky Horror or West Side Story. I’d try to put it together using the list of artists I’d added to my LAUNCHcast station.
I want to be able to adjust that station at will.
I want to hear new artists, ones that aren’t on my list but that I have a chance of liking based on who is on the list.

Based on a bit of Googling, I identified five candidates: last.fm, Slacker, Pandora, mystrands, and Jango. Then I tried them out, one by one. I took a lot of notes during that process. On the off chance that those might be worthwhile to somebody, I post them here:

Words I Learned From Rock and Roll

By paulobrian

On November 8, 2008

In Uncategorized

Despite what Allan Bloom would have us believe, rock music can be a source of learning. Behold the many and variegated words (and phrases) I’ve learned from paying attention to popular music over the years.

abraxas: A mystical word engraved on ancient amulets and charms, signifying deity.
[This was the name of Santana’s second album, which includes the Fleetwood Mac cover “Black Magic Woman.”]
bête noire: A person or concept that is anathema; the bane of one’s existence.
[Bryan Ferry’s seventh album, which includes the song “Kiss And Tell.”]
bon vivant: Enjoying the best things in life.
[From Paul Simon’s “American Tune”: “Still, you don’t expect to be bright and bon vivant / So far away from home.”]
cult of personality: A heroic public image created around the leader of a movement or country, often via mass media.
[Living Colour introduced me to this concept with their first single from the album Vivid.]
desperado: A desperate, dangerous outlaw.
[From the Eagles song of the same name. It started playing on the radio when I was 3, and basically never stopped, so it was without a doubt my first exposure to this word.]
eponymous: Self-titled (e.g. Tracy Chapman by Tracy Chapman is an eponymous album.)
[R.E.M., in their typically droll way, named their 1988 greatest hits collection Eponymous. It’s also a favorite word of rock critics.]
eurythmic: Harmonious.
[I learned this word thanks to Dave Stewart and Annie Lennox naming their band Eurythimcs.]
jitney: (1) A small bus. (2) An unlicensed taxi.
[From Northern State’s “Things I’ll Do”: “Plan you a trip, get you there in a jitney / Write you a song, get you soundin’ like Britney.”]
maharishi: Spiritual teacher.
[I didn’t learn this one from any song or album, but rather from reading up on The Beatles, and the time they spent with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.]
mahout: A person who keeps and/or drives an elephant.
[From Joan Armatrading’s “Drop The Pilot”: “Drop the mahout, I’m the easy rider / Don’t use your army to fight a losing battle.”]
mistral: A strong, cold, often violent wind that occurs around France and Italy.
[Heart has a song I love called “Mistral Wind”, which uses the mistral as a metaphor for joyfully losing control.]
rostrum: A stage or a raised platform for performing.
[From The Who’s “Sally Simpson”: “But soon the atmosphere was cooler as Tommy gave a lesson / Sally just had to let him know she loved him, and leapt up on the rostrum!”]
rubicon: A point of no return.
[Journey taught me this one with the song “Rubicon” on their Frontiers album.]
slàinte mhath: A Scots Gaelic toast, literally meaning “good health.”
[Marillion entitled a song “Slàinte Mhath” on their brilliant Clutching At Straws album.]
son et lumière: A sound and light show.
[From Joe Jackson’s “Glamour And Pain”: “I’m hanging in the air / I look in your window at my own lipstick reflection there / And behind it such a precious son et lumière / Of all the normal stuff, about which I’m supposed to care / I’d like to smash right through / And help myself to your silverware.”]
synchronicity: Meaningful coincidence
[Carl Jung fully articulated this concept in 1952, and Sting seized upon it in 1983, releasing the Police album Synchronicity and naming two songs after the concept: “Synchronicity I” and “Synchronicity II.”]
terrazzo: A multicolored floor of marble or stone chips.
[From Don Henley’s “Drivin’ With Your Eyes Closed”: “So before The Death of Lovers and The Punishment of Pride / Let’s go scrape across the terrazzo / It’s just too hot outside.”]
tinnitus: A severe ringing in the ears.
[This is another one I didn’t learn from a song or album, but rather from paying attention to the music world. Pete Townshend stopped playing electric guitar for a good long time because he suffers from tinnitus.]

I do have a couple of COMBO SCORES to award as well:

desultory philippic: A rambling, somewhat disappointing tirade
[Simon and Garfunkel put “A Simple Desultory Philippic (or How I Was Robert McNamara’d Into Submission)” on their Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme album and sent me to the dictionary twice!]
scaramouche, scaramouche, can you do the fandango?: Clown from commedia dell’arte, can you perform a Portuguese folk dance?
[Unlike many rock songs, which string meaningless lyrics together out of nonsense words, Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” strings meaningless lyrics together out of actual words.]

The Magnetic Fields in Boulder, 10/15/08

By paulobrian

On October 17, 2008

In Uncategorized

The crowd at the Boulder Theater on Wednesday night was largely composed of a) hipsters and b) young gay men. There is a fair amount of overlap between these groups. Thick glasses, retro fashions, and big sideburns were much in evidence.

The show was a lot more like a recital than a rock and roll concert. All acoustic instruments, all players seated. From house left to house right they were:

Shirley Simms (vocals only)
Claudia Gonson (piano & vocals)
John Woo (guitar)
Sam Davol (cello)
Stephin Merritt (bouzouki & vocals)

Gonson did most of the talking, and she did it in this very spacey, random, funny persona, which she blamed on lack of oxygen. Merritt threw in the occasional deadpan remark. There was quite a bit of talking between the songs, which I enjoyed very much. A dominant theme was the invention of narrative connections among the songs in the setlist — for instance, after “The Nun’s Litany”: “And why did she enter the abbey? Well, you see, one year earlier…” leading to “All My Little Words.” There was also quite a bit of comedy interplay, like so:

GONSON: This next song is about Stephin’s dog, whose ears are… huge. They’re like… they’re as big as his head. Would you agree, Stephin?
MERRITT: His ears are *part* of his head.
GONSON: Yeah, but… you know what I… well anyway, it’s called “Walking My Gargoyle.” One, two, three, four…

For the rest of the show, chihuahua references ensued. “Let’s pretend the narrator of this song is also a chihuahua! All the characters are chihuahuas — then it could be made into a number one movie. Maybe if they remade Pieces Of April with an all-chihuahua cast…” (Merritt did the soundtrack for Pieces Of April, the mention of which also led to much musing on what Oliver Platt is doing these days. Quoth Merritt: “One of the worst things about being on tour is that sometimes you want to look something up on IMDb, but you can’t, because you’re on stage!”)

Even though their new album is all heavy distortion (hence its title) and fuzz, everything sounded totally clean at the concert. It was beautiful. All the cleverness was out there to shine, and the sad and lovely parts were heart-piercing. Apparently Merritt suffers from hyperacuity in his left ear, meaning he’s quite sensitive to certain frequencies, including applause. I could see him hold his ear whenever the clapping began, and he kept slipping a silver earplug in and out, including the time when Gonson was rambling to him about some topic, and after a couple of minutes he pulled out his earplug and said, “What?”

The set list was great too — a healthy mix of old and new, Mag Fields and side bands (Gothic Archies, 6ths, etc). I was thrilled to have some of my all-time favorites included — “No One Will Ever Love You”; “Yeah! Oh Yeah!”; “Drive On, Driver”; “Grand Canyon”; “The Book Of Love.”

All in all, a very good time was had by me. Too bad I had to go to work the next day when I should really have been sleeping!